THE CURRE.NT CI NE.MA Time Past P HOTOGRAPHS are said to preserve the past, but of course they do no such thing; they merely give us the means, more accurate-seeming but less trustworthy than written records, of composing-nearly always uncon- sciously-a past appropriate to our needs. So far is it from being the case that the camera cannot lie that one might much more reasonably argue that it can- not tell the truth; what it de- picts is what we see it as de- picting, which is to say that the mechan- ical camera's eye is at the mercy of eyes that are at the mercy of emotions, and in the enormous scrapbook of pho- tographs that mankind has been accu- mulating for a hundred and fifty years now, each generation manages to dis- cover in a single immutable likeness of a certain time and place a likeness dif- ferent from that discovered by any other generation. Studying Brady's photographs of the Civil War, our grandfathers would surely have fixed their attention, as Brady did, on the then fresh horror of all those crumpled young bodies in the foreground; the fields, woods, stone walls, and dusty roads among which the bodies lay would have been too familiar to be worth their notice. For us, however, though the carnage remaIns only a little less terrible to behold than it was, the background landscape has assumed an extraordinary importance-has even taken on, despite the presence of the dead, a nostalgic charm. For such a landscape is largely lost to us, both as a reality in a United States six times as populous as it was during the Civil War and as a symbol of that pastoral inno- cence which, whether it ever existed, we enjoy mourning the loss of, and which is so readily brought to mind by any nineteenth-century rural scene. Now, if still photographs of actual events prove so unstable a means of re- capturing the past, what are we to make of the attempt on the part of movies to pretend to return to a past earlIer than their own invention, giving us in a form that we know to be a fiction what appears to be the real thing? The at- tempt should fail, but every now and then, outrageously, it succeeds; flying ful1 in the face of common sense, it conVInces us that for once we've been shown things exactly as they were- that by openly telling a lie the camera has contrived to tell the truth. This is the unexpected triumph of an Italian movie called "The Organizer," which, in a modest and scrupulous quasi-docu- mentary style, purports to render an ac- count of life among the textile workers of Turin in the closing years of the last century. Obviously, I oughtn't to have been able to believe a bit of it, and I believed it all; every foot of film must have been the most cunnIng- ly calculated make-believe, and every foot of it struck me as authentIc. It's a sad, beau- tiful picture, as well as a ndÏve and old-fashioned one, and I came away from it not altogether un- derstandIng the source of its power to move me. Let me show you, it says, in the quietest possible tone of VOIce, how hard life was and how nearly hopeless the struggle for social justice used to seem Here are a few hundred workers, desperately impoverished and oppressed. Most of them are unable to read and write. They work fourteen hours a day in the mill, and the accident rate is so high that a fifth of them will be laid off, without compensatIon, as unem- ployable cripples. A group of them makes an Ill-planned effort to frighten management into improving conditions. Nothing comes of the effort, and at that moment there arrives in town a slov- enly, bespectacled ex-professor who has given up his life to the labor move- ment. He encourages the workers to strike the mill and to stay on strike as their food and fuel run low; for the first time in Turin' s history, labor dares to stand up against management, and management is aghast. Rich, imperious, unprincipled, it will never give in to this "Socialist" conspiracy, and in the end, b " Th 0 . ". 1 ecause e rganIzer IS so near V like the genuine artIcle, the strike is brutally broken and the starved work- ers return to the mill. Nothing appears to have been gained, but for as long as the struggle continued the workers felt the astonishment of hope; defeat will prove less important to them than their re fusal to despair. As the distrait and not very manly organizer-professor, Marcello Mastroi- anni is at once touching and comical; also excellent are Folco Lulli, Renato Sal vatori, Bernard Blier, F rançois P é- rier, and l\.nnie Girardot. The director was Mario Monicelli, and the director of photography was Giuseppe Rotunno. I suppose it's he who deserves credit for the fact that the very grain of the film looks at least seventy years old -BRENDAN GILL 191 Give today's high school graduate this ke y to success in college . . . ",^" .:::. .'::.:v. .<..y :. .,. ..,;.... .' .'.x :', m ;'::. ." :...:.. .> :: .":.::.0. ; :.;O> . . , , '. .,ðt S . S"" e et\\\\ e ., W", se t\ðd\t\\ :.::. ..: O \' t) /" ",ø'" ot\ (1 \')\ti\\ J' . y ; :,ij ff-.. v.l; .:.: <S1f..... -* . .. . ::::::,. ":::;:;: ..> .:.:.. ,,"õ ..::":':"" > :::L.....'>:" .'.'( : " . .:. .. 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